Old English Literature

Old English literature is the writing of the Anglo-Saxons, the Germanic peoples — Angles, Saxons and Jutes — who settled in Britain from the fifth century after the Roman legions left, and whose language, Englisc, is the ancestor of modern English. It spans roughly four and a half centuries, from the conversion of the English to Christianity in the seventh century to the Norman Conquest of 1066 and a little beyond. About thirty thousand lines of Old English poetry survive, almost all of it in just four manuscripts, alongside a much larger body of prose: sermons, saints’ lives, laws, chronicles and translations. It is the oldest vernacular literature in Europe after Irish and Greek and Latin, and in Beowulf it produced one of the great epics of the world.

To a modern reader, Old English does not look like English at all. The first line of Beowulf reads Hwæt! We Gardena in geardagum, þeodcyninga, þrym gefrunon — “Listen! We have heard of the glory of the Spear-Danes’ kings in the days of old.” It has letters we no longer use (þ and ð for “th”, æ for the vowel in “cat”), grammatical endings like Latin or German, and a vocabulary almost entirely Germanic. Yet much of our everyday core language comes from it: man, wife, child, house, meat, drink, love, hate, sing, earth, heaven, god and nearly all of the hundred most common words we speak.

Historical background

When the Anglo-Saxons arrived they were pagan and largely illiterate, with only runes for short inscriptions. Their culture was oral: stories of heroes and gods were carried in memory and performed aloud by a scop (poet-singer) in the mead-hall of a lord, to the sound of a harp. This oral art shaped the poetry that was later written down. It was formulaic — built from stock phrases that fit the metre, so that a singer could compose as he performed — and it was meant for the ear.

The decisive change came with Christianity. In 597 Pope Gregory the Great sent Augustine (later of Canterbury) to the kingdom of Kent; from the north, Irish monks from Iona brought a parallel mission to Northumbria. With the Church came literacy, Latin, books and monasteries. The great early centre was Northumbria, where the monasteries of Wearmouth and Jarrow produced the Venerable Bede (c. 673–735), whose Latin Ecclesiastical History of the English People (731) is the foundational history of England and the source for the story of the first English poet. The Lindisfarne Gospels, made around 715, show the splendour of this “Northumbrian Renaissance”.

Viking raids from 793 destroyed much of this world. Recovery came under King Alfred the Great of Wessex (reigned 871–899), who defeated the Danes, then set out to restore learning. Finding that hardly anyone south of the Humber could understand Latin, he organised translations into English of the books “most needful for all men to know” — Gregory’s Pastoral Care, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy, Augustine’s Soliloquies, Bede’s History — and probably started the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, a year-by-year record of English history kept in monasteries until 1154. Alfred made English a language of learned prose centuries before most European vernaculars. In the late tenth century a monastic reform produced the period’s finest prose stylists, the homilists Ælfric of Eynsham and Wulfstan, Archbishop of York, whose Sermon of the Wolf to the English (1014) denounces the sins that, he says, have brought the Viking scourge.

The Norman Conquest in 1066 replaced the English aristocracy and Church leadership with French-speaking Normans. English survived as the language of the common people, but Old English literary culture faded; by about 1150 the language had changed so much that we call it Middle English.

The manuscripts

Almost all Old English poetry survives in four books, all copied around the year 1000:

• The Beowulf Manuscript (the Nowell Codex, British Library, Cotton Vitellius A.xv), which also contains the poem Judith. It was scorched in the Cotton Library fire of 1731 and its edges have crumbled.
• The Exeter Book, given to Exeter Cathedral by Bishop Leofric before 1072 and still there — the largest anthology, containing The Wanderer, The Seafarer, The Wife’s Lament, The Ruin, Deor, Widsith and nearly a hundred riddles. It has been used as a cutting board and a beer-mat; there are knife marks and a ring stain on its cover.
• The Vercelli Book, which somehow ended up in Vercelli in northern Italy, perhaps left by a pilgrim on the road to Rome; it contains The Dream of the Rood and Cynewulf’s Elene.
• The Junius Manuscript, with Old Testament poems (Genesis, Exodus, Daniel) and Christ and Satan.

The fragility of this survival is a theme in itself. We have one copy of Beowulf. The heroic poem The Battle of Maldon survives only because an eighteenth-century transcript was made before the manuscript burned. How much else was lost we cannot know.

How the poetry works

Old English poetry is alliterative verse. Each line has four main stresses and is split by a pause (caesura) into two half-lines; the halves are bound together by alliteration — the repetition of the initial sound of stressed syllables. The third stress (the first in the second half-line) is the key; it must alliterate with one or both stresses of the first half:

Oft Scyld Scefing sceaþena þreatum — “Often Scyld Scefing from troops of enemies…”

There is no rhyme and no fixed number of syllables. The effect is weighty, percussive, chant-like, made for a voice with a harp.

Two devices are especially characteristic:

• Kennings — compressed metaphors that rename things: the sea is the hronrad, “whale-road”, or swanrad, “swan-road”; the body is the banhus, “bone-house”; a sword is the beadoleoma, “battle-light”; the sun is “the candle of the sky”.
• Variation — saying the same thing several times in different words, so that a king might be called “lord of the people”, “giver of rings” and “protector of warriors” in successive half-lines, each one turning the object to catch a new light.

There is also litotes, ironic understatement: after a slaughter, the poet says that a man “had no cause to boast”, meaning he lay dead.

The heroic world

The values of the poetry are those of the comitatus, the war-band bound to its lord. The lord gives treasure — rings, swords, horses — in the hall; the warriors repay him with loyalty and, if need be, their lives. To survive one’s lord in battle is the deepest shame. A man’s one lasting possession is lof, praise, the fame that outlives him: “Let him who may win glory before death,” says Beowulf; “that is best for a warrior after he is gone.” Over everything hangs wyrd, fate — “Wyrd often saves an undoomed man, if his courage is good,” Beowulf says, holding fate and courage in tension.

The great poems of this world are:

• Beowulf — the 3,182-line epic of a Geatish hero who kills the monster Grendel and Grendel’s mother in Denmark, and fifty years later, as an old king, dies killing a dragon. It is a heroic poem written by a Christian, saturated with a sense of the transience of glory.
• The Battle of Maldon — the account of a real defeat by the Vikings in Essex in 991, in which the English leader Byrhtnoth, through ofermod (overconfidence), lets the Vikings cross the causeway to fight fairly — and loses. As the end approaches, the old retainer Byrhtwold speaks the most famous lines in Old English: “Mind must be the firmer, heart the bolder, courage the greater, as our strength grows less.”
• The Fight at Finnsburh and Waldere — fragments of the shared Germanic heroic stories.

Elegies: the poetry of loss

The most moving Old English poems are the so-called elegies in the Exeter Book — short, lyrical, intensely sad poems of exile, ruin and the passing of all things.

The Wanderer is spoken by a man who has lost his lord and his kinsmen and roams the frozen sea alone, dreaming that he embraces his lord again before waking to grey waves and falling snow. Looking at a ruined hall, he asks the great ubi sunt question — “where are they now?”:

Where has the horse gone? Where the rider? Where the giver of treasure? Where are the seats of the feast? Where are the joys of the hall?

He concludes that all is transient, and that the wise man finds his only security in the Father in heaven.

The Seafarer describes the hardships of a sailor’s life at sea, the cold and hunger and loneliness — and yet the irresistible longing to set out again, which becomes an image of the soul’s pilgrimage to God. Ezra Pound’s free translation (1911) brought it into modern poetry.

The Wife’s Lament and Wulf and Eadwacer are among the very few early poems spoken by women, haunting and obscure accounts of separation from a lover or husband. The Ruin contemplates the fallen Roman stone city of Bath, “the work of giants”, and imagines the feasting warriors who once filled it. Deor lists legendary sufferings, each stanza ending with the refrain Þæs ofereode, þisses swa mæg — “That passed away; so may this.”

Christian poetry

According to Bede, the first English poet was Cædmon, an illiterate cowherd at the monastery of Whitby under the abbess Hild in the 670s. Ashamed that he could not sing when the harp passed round at feasts, he slipped out to the cattle shed; in a dream a figure commanded him to “sing about the beginning of created things”, and he sang a short hymn in praise of God the Creator. Cædmon’s Hymn — nine lines — is the oldest surviving English poem. It applies the heroic vocabulary of lordship to God: the Creator is the “guardian of the kingdom of heaven”, the “eternal Lord”.

The masterpiece of Christian verse is The Dream of the Rood (rood = cross). A dreamer sees a wondrous tree, glittering with gold and jewels and then drenched with blood; the Cross itself speaks, telling how it was cut down and forced to bear the Lord. Christ appears not as a suffering victim but as a young warrior-hero who strips himself and eagerly mounts the gallows to do battle with death; the Cross, like a loyal retainer, must stand firm and may not bend. Some lines of the poem are carved in runes on the eighth-century Ruthwell Cross in Dumfriesshire. It is the supreme fusion of the heroic and the Christian.

Other religious poems include the four signed by Cynewulf (he wove his name in runes into the text, asking readers to pray for him), the biblical epics of the Junius Manuscript, and Judith, in which the Hebrew heroine beheads the drunken Assyrian general Holofernes.

Riddles and wisdom

The Exeter Book contains about ninety-five riddles, ranging from the pious to the obscene double entendre. Objects speak in the first person and invite us to guess what they are: a bookworm “ate words” but was “no wiser”; a shield complains of endless wounds; a swan’s feathers sing as it flies. The answers are not given. The riddles show a playful, observant, sometimes bawdy imagination behind the gloom of the elegies. There are also gnomic poems of proverbial wisdom (“Frost shall freeze, fire melt wood…”) and charms against wens, bees swarming and sudden stitches.

Legacy

Old English was rediscovered by antiquarians after the Reformation, who sought the origins of the English Church and English law. Its systematic study began in the nineteenth century. Its single greatest champion in modern times was J. R. R. Tolkien, Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, whose lecture “Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics” (1936) persuaded scholars to read Beowulf as a great poem rather than a historical quarry, and whose Middle-earth is soaked in Old English — the Riders of Rohan speak a form of it, Théoden’s lament echoes The Wanderer, and the dragon Smaug owes his cup-stealing to Beowulf. W. H. Auden, who heard Tolkien read Beowulf aloud as an undergraduate, wrote alliterative verse; Seamus Heaney’s translation of Beowulf (1999) became a bestseller.

The literature also gave English its sense of a deep past: the sombre, northern, elegiac strain that runs through English poetry — from Hardy to Larkin — is often traced back to the Wanderer on his icy sea.

In conversation

• “Ubi sunt” — Latin for “where are they?”, the name for the elegiac lament over vanished glory (Where has the horse gone? Where the rider?). Useful for any reflection on loss and transience.
• “Wyrd” — the Old English idea of fate, ancestor of our word weird (as in Macbeth’s “weird sisters”).
• A kenning — “whale-road” for the sea — is a handy name for any compressed poetic metaphor.